Belching Out the Devil

by Mark Thomas

  The negotiations broke down in early 2008. Coke said ‘ no final resolution was possible. An impasse was reached and no further discussions are anticipated at this time.’11 Arguably, the impasse was the conditions of the settlement - Coke would pay millions of dollars but anyone working for Coca-Cola FEMSA and involved in the lawsuit had to leave their jobs, they could no longer work at Coke. But more than this they would be legally bound never to criticise Coca-Cola ever again. According to Edgar Paez this would apply ‘not only in Colombia but everywhere in the whole world. They wanted us to sign an agreement that no one would denounce Coca-Cola any more, for the rest of their lives.’ In effect, the agreement, if signed, would prevent them from campaigning against any multinational that Coca-Cola had business with. From the moment they signed until they day they died.

  The end result of key members of the union leaving Coke and unable to criticise or organise against the company from the outside would effectively mean the union would be finished. Sinaltrainal would cease to exist in the Coca-Cola plants. That is, after all, what is meant by my phrase ‘you shut up, you go away’.

  The money was on the table and all Sinaltrainal had to do was agree and take it. So the men and women who had fought for the right to be in a trade union would become silent. Their right to free speech and freedom of association would be gone for ever. All they had to do was take the money and sign the paper. For men like Giraldo and Manco the prospect of compensation was money they literally could only dream of.

  The union refused to sign. They refused to be silent. Leaving The Coca-Cola Company with an ‘old story’ that would not go away.

  4

  ‘CHILE’

  Bucaramanga, Colombia

  ‘There are no threats or attempts by management to attack or intimidate workers for being affiliated with a union or for being a union organiser or for being a union official.’

  Neville Isdell, CEO, TCCC Annual Meeting 19 April 2005

  This is the story of the first time I stayed with a man called Chile, a Sinaltrainal member who lives inin the Bucaramanga, to the north of Bogota. The city sits in the basin of a plateau ringed by hills, a packed urban island sprawling over its convex foundations and is surrounded by terracotta soil and the ripe light green of the trees. It’s the seventh biggest city in Colombia - the English equivalent would be Leicester or Coventry.

  Given that most Catholic countries draw the line at evoking cooking spices at christenings it should come as no surprise that Chile is a nickname. Though the name derives from the spice, here folk spell it after the country. His real name is Luis Eduardo García, and he earned his moniker after a particularly heated argument with a manager at the local Coca-Cola bottling plant. I met Chile in 2004 on a fact-finding mission, which is how I came to be on a bus travelling through Bucaramanga with a crowd of trade unionists, leftists, Christians and human rights’ campaigners. Each day we would set off to visit displaced people, families of murder victims, NGOs and lawyers, listen to their stories and then head off to our next destination - a sort of human rights coach trip.

  The bus is knackered. Very knackered. You may be familiar with the type of American bus that Evel Knievel used to jump over on his motorbike. Well, our bus looks like the one that he accidentally landed on. Inside it is incredibly hot: were we to be parked in England, someone would be checking the back seat to see if the dog was still alive. There is little respite from the heat. The windows come down only a few centimetres at the top of the frames. In the absence of a breeze to force the air around a little I am trying not to come into contact with the seat’s back, lest I stick there - though given the lack of suspension on this vehicle it is unlikely that any of us are going to sit anywhere for long.

  On board we divide up into our various gangs. Near the front are Pax Christi, a Christian peace outfit, made up of elderly Germans who have traipsed around the fact-finding trip with grim faces and even grimmer clothes. They have an air of concerted concentration and gloom, giving them the appearance of someone trying to digest an espadrille. Everywhere we go they appear with notebooks and pencils ready to catch every misfortune. They are the stenographers of the apocalypse.

  Just a few seats back are the two male Swiss trade unionists, who never sweat and have duty-free breath mints in their rucksacks. They gently nudge, natter, whisper and giggle together: I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a password and a tree-house in their garden back home. Around them are the Americans, who subdivide into those from Brooklyn and those not. Those ‘from’ are loud, brash and, despite the fact that they have never been to Bucaramanga in their life, are prone to shouting directions at the bus driver. He in turn ignores this advice.

  Chile has a square build. His black hair is receding, his T-shirt bulges around his gut and no one save a Krankie could call him a tall man. But he has a confident and determined presence and must have been quite a catch 25 years ago. He stands by the driver, hanging on to the rail up by the front door, and gives a running commentary as we drive past sites of local oppression. It is essentially a historical battlefield tour, except the history is recent and the tour guide personally knows the dead.

  As we pass a large prison, one of the Colombians shouts out. ‘Here!’ he points at the building we can see through the window. ‘Here! This is where they put Chile!’

  The passengers crick their necks in unison to see the jail, the prison cell bars visible from the street. Others join the loud chorus, shouting, ‘There is the prison where Chile was jailed!’

  The man in front of me has both of his arms in the air, almost appealing for sanity. ‘That is where Coca-Cola sent him!’

  ‘They locked him up because of Coca-Cola’s lies!’ shouts another.

  ‘It is true,’ says Chile to the German heads that are now bent over their notebooks, scribbling frantically. His admission serves only to unlock further floodgates of communal anger and it seems everyone has to shout

  ‘There is where they torture him!’

  ‘There is where they abused him!’

  ‘There!’ screams the loudest voice of all, bellowed from one of Chile’s closest friends, ‘There!’ he shouts along the suddenly silent bus, declaring to the fixed faces turned to him. ‘There …is where Chile lost his virginity!’

  And he promptly erupts into raucous laughter, undercutting the sombre and angry mood in a deft moment. The whole bus laughs. Chile laughs hardest of all. He is bent double, slapping his thigh and looking like he might choke.

  By the time we finish the day’s journey and return to Chile’s home it is late, everyone is tired and no one has thought about supper. So Esmeralda, Chile’s partner, gets a Chinese takeaway and for a few moments there is only the sound of cutlery on tin trays and the background hum of the family fish tank. Away from the bravado of the bus Chile drops his nickname and returns to being Luis Eduardo. Assisted by Esmeralda, their daughters Mayela and Laura, and their son Alexander, he tells a less rumbustious tale of how he become a plaintiff in the USA courts accusing the Coca-Cola bottlers of engineering his wrongful imprisonment.

  Luis Eduardo started work for the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Bucaramanga in 1988, working his way up from a cleaner to the position he currently holds, assistant to José Domingo Florez, his best friend who drives a huge red Coke truck. Luis Eduardo is the crate shifter and stacker for the truck. This tale has a familiar start. Initially there was respect for the union but that changed in the mid-1990s when the manager of the plant accused the trade unionists of being ‘guerillas’ and employees’ medical insurance was suddenly cancelled. This provoked a strike, led in part by Luis Eduardo. Then events took an altogether more conspiratorial turn. After the strike the head of security at the Coke plant, José Alejo Aponte, contacted the police accusing Luis Eduardo, Domingo Flores and Álvaro González Pérez, another trade union organiser, of planting a bomb in the bottling plant. The three men went to prison in March 1996 to await trial and spent the next six months there.1

  ‘Coca-C
ola employees publicly accused us, before the authorities, that we were terrorists,’ says Luis Eduardo illuminated by the glow of the fish tank. As proof of the terrorist plot, ‘The boss of security in the firm, he took a packet, a metal box, put it beneath his arm and he ran around the plant saying that it was a bomb, it was a bomb!’ Luis Eduardo shakes his head in wonderment that any sane individual might walk around holding a real bomb under their arm. And, more than this, that the authorities might credulously believe the word of a man who claims he has a bomb tucked under his armpit. Not content with finding a fictitious bomb the company then said it had actually gone off. Where was the damage then? Ah, those cunning terrorists had cleaned it up afterwards. Obviously following a new insurrectionary trend: tidy terrorists, terrorists your mother could like - they may blow up buildings but they always leave some potpourri in a bowl by the smouldering rubble.

  ‘The company [security manager] says that the bomb exploded but there was never any damage inside the company,’ says an incredulous Luis Eduardo.

  Indeed the Regional Prosecutor shared his view, finding that not only were the men innocent of plotting to plant a bomb but that no such bomb existed in the first place.2

  ‘We managed to prove our innocence and Coca-Cola had to return us to our jobs,’ says Luis Eduardo

  But by then the damage had been done, as they had spent six months in prison awaiting trial. Domingo Flores, Luis Eduardo’s best friend arrested alongside him, claims he was tortured by the police. And if it was tough for the men it was even worse for the families.

  ‘For the kids it was really hard,’ says Esmeralda, her arm draped casually around Mayela as they sit on the sofa.

  Luis Eduardo nods in the direction of Laura, ‘My youngest daughter - I had to remove her from the school because her friends said to her that her father was a delinquent and a terrorist.’

  ‘Because it was all on the TV news and in the newspapers,’ adds Esmeralda. So the nine-year-old Laura would demonstrate outside the prison gates, banner in hand, demanding the release of her father. ‘The girls would visit their dad once a month,’ she continues, but the official visits were not enough. ‘They wanted to see him, they’d wait outside the prison and he would see us through the window and throw us a note.’

  ‘In prison in order to communicate with your family, you have to write a note,’ Luis Eduardo explains, so he would wrap the note around a sweet or something he could hurl through the bars of the open cell window, over the wall. Nothing too personal was ever put in it in case it fell into unintended hands. The contents would read, ‘I am OK. Don’t worry, the lawyer came and it’s going OK.’

  Except it was far from OK. With no wages for six months Esmeralda battled to keep the bank from taking their home and had to resort to begging to get by.

  It was far from OK for Luis Eduardo too. He and Domingo Flores were placed in the highest security wing of the prison alongside the paramilitaries, the people who were trying, and often succeeding, in killing trade unionists. Both men avoided showers and toilets for fear of being attacked, and Luis Eduardo’s face displays his revulsion as he revisits the stench of the cell, the humiliation of being forced to piss in bottles and shit in bags. And so they lived in the stench and the fear for six months, throwing notes wrapped around sweets to his children in the street.

  ‘Coca-Cola bottlers were involved in this conspiracy because the ones who denounced us were administrators within the company, managers of the company,’ he says. So alongside the family of Isidro Gil the names of Luis Eduardo García , José Domingo Flores and Álvaro González Pérez were added to the suit filed in the USA, under the Alien Tort Claims Act. The court documents allege the Coca-Cola bottler, Panamco Colombia,3 ‘brought charges against the aforesaid Plaintiffs in retaliation for their trade union activities. Their resulting prolonged unlawful detention and accompanying torture was therefore the result of Panamco Colombia’s malicious prosecution.’4

  The Coca-Cola Company have never apologised for the bottlers’ actions or sought to investigate them, preferring to stick to their original defence, namely that The Coca-Cola Company does not own the bottlers in the ‘Coca-Cola system’. When questioned on this the company replied, ‘TCCC have discussed [my italics] the matter with the bottler and understands that the bottler’s employees gave truthful statements to the Colombian government investigators…Messrs García and Flores were compensated for their time away from work [back pay], provided additional security and protection and have remained employed by the bottler.’5

  And that just goes to show how caring the bottler is: having made accusations that the men were terrorists the bottlers kindly gave the men their jobs back when the claims turned out to be bollocks. Though the men were not actually paid any compensation for being falsely imprisoned by the security manager’s ‘truthful statements’, they were ‘compensated for their time away from work’ and I imagine the men felt that they were compensated merely to be back in the caring bosom of their employer. Though they have not expressed that.

  With unintended irony TCCC have described the lawsuit brought by Sinaltrainal against them as ‘aggressive’.

  Over the past couple of years The Coca-Cola Company have taken great pains to promote themselves as a union-friendly company, which ‘respects our employees’ right to join, form or not to join a labor union without fear of reprisal, intimidation or harassment.’6 In fact they say ‘the Company have shared the Policy [for respecting trade union rights] with our independent bottling partners and is committed to working with and encouraging them to uphold the principles in the Policy.’7 You don’t need a degree in semantics to see that a dead worm could wriggle through the gaps in this. Seldom has the word ‘encouraging’ been used in such an unencouraging manner - this state of affairs also applies to the words ‘committed and ‘principles’. It is a mini masterpiece in stating the bloody obvious, as they have ‘shared the Policy with our independent bottling partners’. They are ‘committed to working with and encouraging’ the bottlers to respect workplace rights. Frankly I know nursery school teachers with better discipline policies than that. So what form will Coca-Cola’s encouragement take? Praising the good and ignoring the bad? So if no paramilitaries shoot Coke workers, do the bottlers get a sticker? Essentially we can paraphrase the statement as: We’ll ask them to be nice but don’t blame us if it goes tits up.

  It was time to visit Luis Eduardo aka Chile one more time. It has been seven years since he and the union launched the court case in the USA in 2001, five years have passed since the call for an international boycott and four years since I last visited him. I wanted to find out how his family and the union had faired under Coca-Cola’s new-found respect for employees’ rights, what had changed for them?

  ‘We’ll find some examples of how they [the bottlers: Coca-Cola FEMSA] respect our rights.’ Chile told me, so once again he is taking me on a tour of Bucaramanaga, though this time on foot. As the morning sun has yet to rise to the humid midday prime and the traffic pollution hasn’t had time to build up a head of fug, it is the perfect time to bustle through the city. We pass the market carts piled high with star fruit, pineapples and grapes, dusty from the orchards and the city dirt. The juice sellers lounge by their stands, pausing after the rush-hour surge, chatting and cleaning the fresh pulp and pips from the blades of their blenders. Occasionally people call out his nickname, ‘Chile!’ and wave as we march through. The market bingo hall is just getting started, and those who can’t play watch from the street as the numbers are called in a rapid-fire monotone by a man who mistook hair oil for charisma. On the pavement a patchwork of vendors sit on their haunches beside rolled out mats decorated with random wares, from small packs of screwdrivers to hair dye, pens to lighters, duct tape to yo-yos and nail clippers to radio batteries. They are laid out in a deliberately random fashion, like objects in a memory test. Unified by nothing but cheapness, I marvel at the world of possibilities this incongruous mix of goods represents. A world wher
e someone might stop to pick up some industrial gloves and while they are at it impulse-buy some joss sticks.

  Onwards we stride, searching for a specific man. The trouble is that we don’t have the man’s name, we don’t know where he lives and he doesn’t know we are coming to see him. All of which sounds rather unprepared; after all, the key to any quest is to know what you are going in search of before you start. I doubt Jason would have found the Golden Fleece were he to have set out with a vague idea of getting some duty-free knitwear. Nevertheless, there are two facts that will help us in our endeavour: one, Chile’s certain that he knows the district the man lives in and two, the man we are after was recently knocked over by an out-of-control police car. Of all the things that might mark a man out in his community, being run over by the cops is definitely a distinguishing feature: misfortune is the satnav of a community. So we have only to end up in the right district, approach a local and say, ‘We are looking for the guy who was waiting at the bus stop for work when for no reason whatsoever a cop car ploughed into him’ and in theory they should know where to find him…and they do.